Language assessment is increasingly computermediated. This development presents opportunities with new task formats and equally a need for renewed scrutiny of established conventions. Recent recommendations to increase integrated skills assessment in lecture comprehension tests is premised on empirical research that demonstrates enhanced construct…

Individual differences in adaptability, buoyancy, and motivation -- each of which are associated with regulatory processes -- are theorised to influence course satisfaction and test anxiety among student populations; however, the unique contribution of each has yet to be examined. The present study recruited 156 undergraduate students who…

There is growing concern about the mental wellbeing of young people, including how this is related to national tests. This is a particularly important policy issue in England, where it is claimed that the end of primary Key Stage 2 tests cause schools, pupils and teachers stress. I investigate this issue using data from the Millennium Cohort…

Statistics anxiety is extremely common in undergraduate psychology students. The Statistics Anxiety Rating Scale (STARS) is at present the most widely used measure to assess statistics anxiety, measuring six distinct scales: test and class anxiety, interpretation anxiety, fear of asking for help, worth of statistics, fear of statistics teachers…

A cross-national comparison was conducted between U.K. and U.S. higher education students on the Test Anxiety Measure for College Students (TAM-C). The TAM-C was administer to 1,776 U.K. and U.S. higher education students online. The results of tests of measurement invariance found the TAM-C invariant across country and gender. In addition,…

The mass shift to Open-Book, Open-Web (OBOW) assessments during the pandemic highlighted new opportunities in Higher Education for developing accessible, authentic assessments that can reduce administrative load. Despite a plethora of research emerging on the effectiveness of OBOW assessments within disciplines, few currently evaluate their…

In the UK education system, an 'audit culture' has led to pressures being placed on students to achieve high grades in their GCSEs. It has been suggested that schools are required to achieve good academic results and look after their students' wellbeing, causing a conflict in relation to public examinations, such as GCSEs. School staff support…

Standardised tests help measure student's progress at school and can inform education policy about existing shortfalls. However, too much testing could lead to much pressure on students and teachers to learn and teach for a test, something that would take the joy out of the learning process. Many parents and educators are all too familiar with…

East Asian dominance in international large-scale assessments is widely known. This is often explained as an outcome of highly competitive, exam-oriented education systems in East Asia, wherein students partake in a fierce competition for limited college entrance. Although achievement scores may be comparatively higher, the argument goes, the…

Background: Prior research has shown that test anxiety is negatively related to academic buoyancy, but it is not known whether test anxiety is an antecedent or outcome of academic buoyancy. Furthermore, it is not known whether academic buoyancy is related to performance on high-stakes examinations. Aims: To test a model specifying reciprocal…

The aim of this study was to follow up exploratory research suggesting that the inverse relationship between test anxiety and examination performance was mediated by cognitive distortions such as catastrophising. Self-report data for measures of test anxiety and cognitive distortions were collected from students in their final year of compulsory…

Despite a literature spanning over 50 years, there has been little test anxiety research conducted on samples of school-aged students drawn from the UK. As a consequence, little in known about the test anxious experience in the UK, and whether this experience is contextualized by features of the UK educational context. For this reason, the…

Recent changes to educational policy which have focused attention on the use of high stakes testing as performance and accountability measures have renewed interest in test anxiety both in the UK and the USA. The aim of this paper is to provide a critical examination of the test anxiety construct, and explore the ways in which test anxiety is…

Despite a long history of interest in North American and Western European literature, researchers in the UK are only now beginning to turn attention to the issue of academic stress in schoolchildren and how it may affect emotional well-being, health and performance on school assessments. Based on the author's experiences of designing an extensive…

This study attempted a hierarchical integration of several dispositional determinants of test anxiety (TA) [Sarason, I.G. (1984). "Stress, anxiety and cognitive interference: Reactions to tests." "Journal of Personality and Social Psychology," 46, 929-938.], namely the Big Five personality traits [Costa, P.T. Jr., & McCrae,…